Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  Udolpho, as the novel’s title suggests, is full of mysteries, and of threats – unwanted suitors, brigands, the unspeakable horror that lurks behind a picture covered with a ‘black veil’. The most tangible threat, though, is Montoni himself, who wants to gain control of his wife’s money and estates. Once his wife dies in suspicious circumstances, Montoni turns the pressure onto Emily, who is her aunt’s heiress. Emily eventually escapes, returns to France, is rescued from a shipwreck, and takes refuge with the Count de Villefort and his children, Henri and Blanche. Mysteries continue, however; haunting music plays, strange sounds are heard, characters inexplicably resemble the dead, or vanish from a locked room. Mad nuns mutter. But the truth, when it emerges, is all resolutely natural. There are no ghosts; everything is explained. There has been murder, though. One of Emily’s uncles has indeed murdered his wife, but a different uncle, not Montoni. Montoni has only ever been interested in money. Emily eventually marries Valancourt, her anaemic love interest, and returns to her family estates in France.

  Catherine Morland, or so we gather, is introduced to The Mysteries of Udolpho by her friend Isabella Thorpe. Isabella, who is four years older than Catherine, and ‘at least four years better informed’ in matters of society and fashion, has a course of ‘horrid’ novel reading planned; ‘when you have finished Udolpho’, she tells Catherine, ‘we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you’. The list, in fact, contains only seven titles – ‘Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries’. These are all real novels; they’re a handful of the rash of second-rate imitations that emerged as the Gothic became successful. Jane probably wouldn’t have ever anticipated that her audience would know them really well.

  Isabella, it’s clear, hasn’t read any of these novels herself; she’s going on the recommendation of her ‘particular friend’ Miss Andrews who has ‘read every one of them’. Not reading is quite a theme in this most self-consciously bookish of Jane’s novels.

  How much of Udolpho Isabella has read is unclear. Catherine announces that ‘I am got to the black veil’, that is, early in Volume 2, where Emily becomes intrigued by a veiled picture frame hung in a ‘dark corner’ of one of the castle’s many unoccupied chambers. Isabella’s response is to exclaim, ‘Are you indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?’, which suggests that she has at least glanced at the final pages of the last volume. There’s no indication she’s read more, though. Elsewhere in Northanger, Jane takes the time to indicate exactly how familiar a character is with a particular novel. Henry Tilney demonstrates that he has indeed read Udolpho; he comes close, at one point, to quoting sections of it from memory. It’s made just as clear that Isabella’s brother John tends to skim-read the novels he does bother to open. Isabella, fickle and impatient, may well have developed similar reading habits. So too, it turns out, may Catherine.

  At the time Jane tells us she was writing Northanger, though, most readers would have read Udolpho. Jane could have expected them to recognise that, if Catherine has only got as far as the ‘black veil’, she has another two and a half volumes of Udolpho to go, over 400 pages in modern money. And she has no time to read them.

  In fact, from the very point that we’re told how far Catherine has got in the text, everything conspires to interrupt her reading.

  In the next chapter, her brother James and Isabella’s brother John, who are university friends, arrive in Bath.j Catherine reads a little more during that afternoon, and a little the next morning, but later that day drives out to Claverton Down. The evening is spent at a theatre, the morning after at the Pump Room. All that afternoon, and the next day (a Thursday), her ‘chief concern’ is ‘what gown and what head-dress she should wear’ at the ball on Thursday evening. On the Friday morning, Catherine doesn’t read but instead divides her attention between the window and ‘the clock’, anxious that her planned walk with Eleanor Tilney will have to be put off because of the weather. She drives out in the afternoon – tricked into it by John Thorpe, who claims that he has seen the Tilneys setting off without her. The evening is spent with the Thorpes. On Saturday, Catherine can think of little else but her fear that she has offended the Tilneys; in the evening she sees them at the theatre and is happy to discover that the situation is repairable. No reading here.

  The day after, as Jane makes a point of reminding us, is Sunday and Catherine, clergyman’s daughter that she is, surely doesn’t read novels on a Sunday. On Monday she goes for a walk to Beechen Cliff with Eleanor and Henry Tilney, and then goes shopping ‘for some indispensible yard of ribbon’. She may perhaps read a little, but we’re not told that she does. On Tuesday the news of Isabella and James’s engagement is revealed. Catherine spends most of this day, and the next, with Isabella, ‘in schemes of sisterly happiness’; later that day she dines with the Tilneys. The next day she visits Isabella, and the evening is spent at a ball – there is no mention of reading.

  At the beginning of Chapter 17 we learn that Catherine has been in Bath for five weeks. There’s a week or ten days which passed before Catherine made any acquaintances. She then met Henry one day, and the Thorpes the next. ‘Eight or nine days’ later, James and John arrive. Call that three weeks or thereabouts. Almost all of the next two weeks are detailed above. It’s also in Chapter 17 that Eleanor Tilney invites Catherine to come for a visit when they leave Bath at the end of the week. That week, for Catherine, passes away in dreams of Northanger, and in growing suspicions of Isabella’s devotion to James, but not, it seems, in reading.

  Henry Tilney is highly educated, highly literate, a self-confessed lover of novels (‘I have read hundreds and hundreds’). He’s an expert reader. He boasts that he finished Udolpho ‘in two days’, that’s two full days of uninterrupted reading. Catherine never manages to carve out anything approaching this kind of reading time. And she isn’t a terribly experienced novel reader – she hasn’t, for example, read Burney’s Camilla, which was a hugely successful, popular book. As we saw above, it’s clear that she’s read the first volume of Udolpho, and that she’s started the second.

  But it’s also strongly suggested that, even though Catherine at one point seems to mention a scene which takes place in the fourth volume, she hasn’t read any of the rest of the second half of the novel, or if she has, she’s been flicking through in an effort to find all the really exciting bits. On the journey to Northanger, Henry starts to tease her about what she might find at the abbey:

  ‘But you must be aware that when a young lady is (by whatever means) introduced into a dwelling of this kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family. While they snugly repair to their own end of the house, she is formally conducted by Dorothy, the ancient housekeeper, up a different staircase, and along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before. Can you stand such a ceremony as this? Will not your mind misgive you when you find yourself in this gloomy chamber—too lofty and extensive for you, with only the feeble rays of a single lamp to take in its size—its walls hung with tapestry exhibiting figures as large as life, and the bed, of dark green stuff or purple velvet, presenting even a funereal appearance? Will not your heart sink within you? […] Dorothy, meanwhile, no less struck by your appearance, gazes on you in great agitation, and drops a few unintelligible hints.’

  Catherine is naively entranced. ‘Oh! Mr Tilney, how frightful! This is just like a book!’ It’s like lots of books – Henry’s patching together scenes and descriptions from Gothic novels and adding his own exaggerations. He takes the bedchamber without a lock from the second volume of Udolpho, but what the whole passage most resembles is the third and fourth volumes of the novel, in particular the chapters when the family of the Count de Villefort arrive at Chateau-le-Blanc and, shortly afterwards, help
to rescue Emily from shipwreck, and the chapters which concentrate on the apparently haunted bedchamber in which the former mistress of the chateau died.

  The housekeeper at the Chateau-le-Blanc is called Dorothée. On the first night that Blanche, the daughter of the Count de Villefort, spends at the chateau, she has to pass ‘through a long oak gallery’ to reach her bed-chamber, a room with ‘spacious and lofty walls’ and ‘high antiquated casements’. It has a ‘gloomy air’ and is in ‘a remote situation’, away from the rest of the family. The chamber is ‘hung’ with ‘faded tapestry’. Blanche’s canopied bed is draped with ‘blue damask’. Dorothée later remarks on Emily’s similarity to her late mistress (unsurprisingly, since Emily is that lady’s niece). A little later in his story Henry mentions a fluttering tapestry which conceals a secret entrance; that, too, is a scene which takes place at the Chateau-le-Blanc.

  Catherine doesn’t seem to register any of these quite obvious similarities. ‘I am sure your housekeeper is not really Dorothy’, she says, half-doubtingly – surely if she’d actually read these chapters, she would have recognised not just the name but this part of the story, straight away, would realise that Henry is teasing her. She would get the joke, as Henry means for her to do. But it seems to sail over her head. Concerns about ghosts, madness, or secret entrances – all of which are prominent towards the end of Udolpho – never occur to her. Nor does she seem to realise that there’s a character named ‘Henri’ in the novel – and that the name of Henri’s sister Blanche, like the name Eleanor, is a French name, associated with European royalty.k Wouldn’t the coincidence have caught her interest?

  When Catherine finds the chest in her bedroom at the abbey, she’s completely perplexed by the monogram; ‘She could not, in whatever direction she took it, believe the last letter to be a T; and yet that it should be anything else in that house was a circumstance to raise no common degree of astonishment.’ Why is she so astonished? The chest has presumably come from one of the women who married into the Tilney family. If Catherine has read the second half of Udolpho, she’s encountered numerous examples of female characters inheriting property from other women.

  Well, actually, all of this points to the same conclusion as her continued fascination with the character of Montoni: she hasn’t read the second half of the novel. The characters of Henri and Blanche aren’t introduced until the middle of the third volume; what Henry’s Gothic story does, as well as igniting Catherine’s imagination, is to indicate that, just as we ought to be suspecting from how little time she’s spent reading, Catherine hasn’t reached that point in the book yet. Thinking of Gothic buildings, she doesn’t think about the Chateau-le-Blanc, the building which dominates the last third of Udolpho. She talks about buildings being ‘uninhabited and left deserted for years, and then the family come back to it unawares, without giving any notice, as generally happens’ – that’s what happens with Udolpho, but in the case of the Chateau, servants are sent ahead from Paris to prepare the house.

  Catherine, we’re told, has brought both her writing desk and her netting box with her to Northanger; she hasn’t brought Udolpho. We don’t know where her copy of the novel – probably the property of a circulating library – even is at this point. She has no opportunity to return to the text. Catherine is, from the first, enthralled by Udolpho – ‘I should like to spend my whole life in reading it’, she says – and it seems that we’re meant to understand that, in essence, this is what happens. She’s destined never to complete the novel, to spend her whole life in the state of reading it, its mysteries remaining forever mysterious to her.

  What Jane’s trying to do here, it seems to me, is to keep Catherine trapped in a state of suspense which her own readers never have to share. Jane’s readers, if they’ve read Udolpho properly, to the end, ought to be able to pick out all the references and in-jokes that pass Catherine by so completely. Jane’s readers ought to be able to pat themselves on the back for recognising that the names Henry and Eleanor deliberately echo Henri and Blanche. They should know Catherine’s suspicions about General Tilney are absurd precisely because she compares him to Montoni, and they’re already aware, not only that Montoni hasn’t murdered his wife, but that, in the second half of the novel, he doesn’t pose any threat. Reading the second volume of Northanger Abbey, we ought to be continually coming across passages which we recognise already, anticipating scenes and settings and actions before they occur.

  Any reader familiar with Udolpho would have been waiting for Catherine to find her way into Mrs Tilney’s room – just as Emily St Aubert makes her way into the rooms of the dead Marchioness. Alerted by the close resemblance between Henry’s story and the Chateau-le-Blanc chapters of Udolpho, they would have found echo after echo. Catherine shares her distaste for the new with Blanche, who prefers the ‘antient’ to ‘the modern … gay and elegant’. Like Blanche, she explores the building. The position of the late Mrs Tilney’s room – in a ‘gallery’, close by a ‘winding staircase’ – seems intended to recall Blanche’s discovery of the rooms of the Marchioness, that other dead mistress of a house (‘she found herself in another gallery, one end of which was terminated by a back stair-case’). When Henry comes up the staircase, and finds Catherine loitering outside his mother’s room, her reaction (‘How came you here?’ she demands, her voice one ‘of more than common astonishment’) corresponds to the aged Dorothée’s surprise at unexpectedly finding Blanche: ‘How could you find your way hither?’ she asks, her ‘countenance’ marked with ‘terror and surprise’.

  All of this leads us to the rather odd conclusion that Catherine, at Northanger, is acting out parts of Udolpho, slipping from one role to another, but – apparently – without being aware of what she’s doing.

  It’s only fair to mention that there is one point where Catherine does seem to refer consciously to a scene in the second half of Udolpho (‘Would the veil in which Mrs Tilney had last walked, or the volume in which she had last read, remain to tell what nothing else was allowed to whisper?’), but this is one solitary, fleeting reference to weigh against every other indication in the text. She’s ignorant of everything else. It’s not even entirely clear that we’re in Catherine’s mind at this point – the voice of the narrator is more intrusive in Northanger than it is in Jane’s later novels, and far less deftly deployed. Then, too, there was, by 1803, a copper-plate illustration of precisely this scene in Udolpho – when Emily and Dorothée venture into the rooms of the dead Marchioness, untouched since her death years before.l Perhaps Jane means to indicate that Catherine has done no more than glance at the illustration in the fourth volume while Isabella Thorpe was reading it.

  Catherine finds nothing Gothic in Mrs Tilney’s room – no veils cracked with age, no prayer books, no discarded gloves. She’s disappointed, and profoundly ashamed of herself. Henry’s discovery of her compounds her feelings; he all but forces Catherine into naming her hazy suspicions about General Tilney, and then scolds her for doing so. In spite of the fact that he was the one to excite her expectations of Northanger when he might just as easily have calmed them, Henry appears genuinely appalled; ‘What have you been judging from?’ he demands, ‘Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?’

  Poor Catherine scuttles off to her own room. Once there, she’s quick to locate all the blame at the feet of ‘Mrs Radcliffe’. There’s no breath of criticism of Henry’s foolish story-telling (that ‘dearest’ has perhaps had its effect). Catherine doesn’t even really blame herself very much. She blames Gothic novels: ‘She saw that the infatuation had been created, the mischief settled, long before her quitting Bath, and it seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged.’

  Critics have tended to agree with Catherine, but, as I think the reader must have been intended to recognise, this is grossly unfair. Jane has gone to quite a lot of trouble to suggest that Catherine either hasn’t read more than half a Gothic novel, or, if she has
, has read it with such a breathtaking lack of attention that she might as well not have bothered. If Catherine had read Udolpho properly, read it to the end, she would have discovered, in the final pages, one of Radcliffe’s clearest messages: ‘when the mind has once begun to yield […] trifles impress it with the force of conviction’. Even as early as the first volume of Udolpho, Radcliffe remarks how ‘lamentable’ it is, that Emily’s ‘excellent understanding should have yielded, even for a moment, to the reveries of superstition, or rather to those starts of imagination, which deceive the senses’. If Catherine had taken that on board, her experiences at Northanger might have been very different.

  What Jane is trying to show with Catherine, I would suggest, is a reader who doesn’t read properly, who brings her own preconceptions and expectations to the text, who blames the author for the ideas she’s gained from an incomplete, inattentive reading. Jane doesn’t intend to ‘desert’ Radcliffe, to expose her to ridicule. She’s attempting to do the opposite.

  Jane indicates what Catherine hasn’t read. But she also tells us what she has.

  In the first chapter she names two of the texts which Catherine learned by heart as a child. We’re told that Catherine has read Samuel Richardson’s 1750s novel Sir Charles Grandison at home (or that she has heard it read aloud); it’s a novel her mother likes. We know that she’s read ‘poetry and plays, and things of that sort’ and does not ‘dislike travels’. We know that she’s read some history, though she doesn’t care for it: ‘it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.’